The return of the archbishop

Horrible man, the archbishop of Canterbury – cruel, callous, ruthless, tyrannical. He doesn’t think so of course, but he is. He’s again sticking his oar in to prevent suffering people from ending their own lives.

Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury; Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, and Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, have come together for the first time to urge peers to reject proposals that would allow families to help loved ones to die abroad free from the threat of prosecution.

It would surely put vulnerable people at serious risk, especially sick people who are anxious about the burden their illness may be placing on others. Moreover, our hospice movement, an almost unique gift of this country to wider humankind, is the profound and tangible sign of another and better way to cope with the challenges faced by those who are terminally ill, by their loved ones and by those who care for them.

Notice the conditonal tense about imagined vulnerable people while the real, non-conditional, known people who have horrible diseases and don’t want to experience the last, worst days of those diseases go unmentioned. Notice how brutally callous that is. Notice the soothing irrelevant claptrap about hospices. If people prefer hospices, they will go to hospices! But some people will find their condition unendurable in a hospice or anywhere, and want to escape instead. It should not be up to the archbishop of Canterbury to decide whether they can do that or not. He’s not their daddy, and it’s none of his business.

OB: I think it should be pointed out here that the ‘peers’ referred to in the quote from the Telegraph are not Williams’s fellow clerics, but his fellow members of the British House of Lords. He sits in that exalted chamber as a ‘Lord Spritual’ (most of the rest being ‘Lords Temporal’).

Frustration of democracy is the Lords’ forte: indeed the only purpose of its continued existence. The proposed legislation Williams objects to has already been passed by the House of Commons before being sent ‘up’ to the likes of him for lordly consideration, albeit as an amendment to other legislation. This indicates that mass feeling in Britain probably goes the other way.

Canute was wise enough to shift himself as the tide rolled in. Williams may not be so shrewd. A bit of paddling, wading or surfing may be necessary on his part before discretion looms as the better wave to catch.

I think that the potential negative effect of the legalization of euthanasia that the Archbish highlights is definitely something that needs to be considered, especially in a world of ever-expanding economically inactive lifespan and contracting societal provision for the elderly. (There’s certainly precedent for the development of social expectations of suicide in certain circumstances – though driven by concepts of honour and shame – hence ‘doing the honourable thing’ – rather than economics.)

I certainly don’t think such an effect is a foregone conclusion, of course. I don’t think it’s even probable. Nevertheless, I think it is not wholly fair to dismiss the Archbish’s concerns quite so blithely… even if he is factually wrong about the degree of risk.

He seems to fear that legalizing euthanasia might facilitate a change in social attitudes that would devalue the life of the elderly and vulnerable. Such a change, if it occurred, would likely affect far greater numbers than are currently in need of the relief of physician-aided death – so it’s quite utilitarian, really. He is motivated by avoiding what could be a greater evil than extending the suffering of a relative few. I don’t think that marks him as ‘cruel, callous, ruthless, tyrannical.’

If he is wrong, of course, the effect will be that there is unnecessary suffering. But that’s a risk with any judgement call about future effects, isn’t it? Vaccination, herd culling, emissions reduction… loads of policies have present costs that need to be offset against future risks.

Personally, I’m wholly in favour of permitting physician-aided voluntary euthanasia despite my mild misgivings. That’s in part because I’m far more of a social libertarian than I would expect a Churchman to be, as well as because I have a different set of moral assumptions. But it’s also because I call that risk differently – if I thought the risk was high enough I might well be on a different side of the fence.

Of course, it would be nice if he was calling for research to test the risks, or for an exploration of how the risks might be lessened, but we all know his limitations and prejudices.

The archbishops and the rabbi are using the possibility of risk solely because they know they cannot get away with offering only religious arguments. But religious arguments are the only arguments that truly weigh with them. Their concern about risk is merely a pose.

They argue that legalising assisted dying would put the vulnerable seriously at risk. (But what, pray tell, are the dying, if not vulnerable?) This is specious. It has been shown in study after study that vulnerable people are not at risk in jurisdictions where assisted dying is legal. Also, conditions of palliative and hospice care, as well as pain control, tends to improve, and not to diminish, in such jurisdictions.

Contrary to religious myth, people do not, as a rule, want either to kill people or to see them die. But the religious, like the ABC, the RC archbishop of Wesminster, and Rabbi Sacks, while they offer supposedly secular or nonreligious arguments, are really convinced, on religious grounds alone, that no one should be permitted to die in a way other than they could describe as ‘natural’ (which is code for ‘according to God’s will’).

If anyone is looking for an absolute guarantee that a law permitting assisted dying will never be abused, they simply do not understand the process of policy development and decision. Of course, there are risks, just as there are significant risks in setting speed limits on motorways. But studies in the Netherlands and Oregon have not shown that the risk factor is significant, while there is a 100% certainty that there are a significant number of people who suffer horibly in their last days.

It should be noted that these religious authorities are not saying that people should not be permitted to refuse treatment, or to stop receiving nutrition or hydration in their last days, even though this will likely result in their deaths. In common law, forcing a person to undergo treatment, or to continue receiving nutrition and hydration, is considered to be common assault. However, the risk factors in such cases are roughly equivalent to those obtaining where a dying person requests assistance in dying. And there is no reason to believe that the risk of abuse is any higher in the latter than in the former case.

None of this is mentioned in the letter from the archbishops and the rabbi, which is almost entirely a piece of religious spin. Instead of being attended to as an important statement by reputable authorities, this should be dismissed as the amateur meddling that it most assuredly is. It’s time we showed these men the door. They have no special competence in these matters, and should be dismissed from significant public notice.

“Euthanasia is wrong. It just is. It is wrong. Now I know there must be some kind of good reason that I think that… let’s see… well it might lead to people getting bumped off too soon mightn’t it? That’ll do.”

Slippery slope arguments aren’t necessarily fallacious. It’s just that so many of them are weak. The most common type of slippery slope argument is the horrible result argument: i.e. there is something horrible at the bottom of the slope, and if we take step X we’ll inexorably end up there … or at least create an unacceptable risk that can’t be ameliorated in any reasonable way.

Such an argument has to show both that the result really is horrible and that there’s some mechanism that will drive us to THAT result (or at least create the terrible and unacceptable risk of getting there). I do think that such arguments can be strong if, for example, they are about actions that would undermine some sort of acknowleged source of restraint on government power – because we know from history and observation that governments like to exercise power and that populism so often encourages it.

But outside of that situation, it’s hard to find arguments that offer a truly horrible result and also a truly plausible mechanism to drive us down the slope towards it. I think that the Great Slippery Slope to something Nazi-like at the bottom is an excellent example of where slippery slope reasoning doesn’t work, and it has been debunked many times before. Still, bishops and other such trsditional moralists do love invoking the Great Slippery Slope.

Not sure if that’s going on here, though. I just read it as being about the obvious point that there could be abuses – as if every statute regulating euthanisia (e.g. in Oregon) doesn’t acknowledge this and attempt to minimise it.

Outeast, I would just like to suggest that, in matters of public policy, the matter is never black and white. In the case of the Netherlands, there has been a long tradition of Christians using data in a deliberately misleading way, though it would be foolish to suggest that the law is never abused. In Oregon the stats are fairly clear, because the Oregon law is unacceptably narrow, and provides no option for people suffering from long-term degenerative conditions to choose assistance in dying. Like the Swiss law governing assistance in suicide, Oregon stipulates that the means of dying must be prescribed by doctors and be self-administered by the dying person, whose prognosis must be that death is expected within six months. This has many advantages, but it excludes all those who, because of the nature of their disease, are unable to self-administer drugs, and those whose dying may be protracted and miserable.

The proposed law in the the UK parliament concerns only how the law will respond to those who accompany friends or relatives to Switzerland (abroad) to take advantage of Swiss (or foreign) assisted suicide laws. (At present, Switzerland is the only option for nonresidents.) The injustice of this should be plain. All those unable to afford the trip ‘abroad’ are forced to die without the option.

The three religious talking heads think that this is the thin edge of the wedge, and that euthanasia is sure to follow. It may do, but the language that religious opponents of assisted dying insist on using, language that is badly tainted by the use made of the word ‘Euthanasie’ by the Nazis for those deemed unworthy of life (Lebensunwirdig Leben), is in itself misleading. Assistance in dying is concerned wholly with provision of assistance for those who make a rational, competent, and stable choice, in intolerable circumstances, to end their lives in order to bring their suffering to an end. Euthanasia, which is generally understood as something done to someone, very often when the suffering person is unable to decide or make his or her wishes known, is an entirely different question, and should be carefully distinguished from assistance in dying, where the dying person is an active participant in the process.

As Russell says, there are always possibilities for abuse. This is taken into consideration whenever policy decisions are made, but ability to control for abuse, where decision is required to be competent, rational and stable, is surely not beyond our wit to achieve.

Slippery slopes, of course, are not always fallacies, as anyone who has been in an avalanche will testify, but religious people tend to see them all over the place in relation to assistance in dying, for they think that, where God is not in charge of questions of life and death, human beings tend to chaos and disaster rather than to care and compassion. This may derive from their experience of religious cruelty. It is neither the necessary nor the inevitable outcome of choice.

My note crossed with yours, Russell, but it is perhaps worthwhile noting that the bishops and the rabbi do in fact invoke the ‘slippery slope’.They do this in two ways. They end with the claim that “This amendment would mark a shift in British law towards legalising euthanasia.” But they also include the claim that “it would surely put vulnerable people at serious risk” (my emphasis). The weight borne here by the word ‘serious’ is considerable.

There is no cogent basis for this claim. Slippery slope arguments may not always be fallacious, but, of those that are not, the most significant depend upon empirical evidence. In his book on slippery slope arguments, Douglas Walton suggests that the value of slippery slope arguments is that they shift the burden of proof onto those arguing for change. This is contrary to reason. Slippery slope arguments leave the one making the argument with the burden of proof. In the absence of evidence slippery slope arguments are essentially scare tactics and empty words.

The Church of England has been remarkably unsuccessful in scaring people, though they have carried out a concerted campaign against change in the law, much of it devoted to trying to alarm the disabled and the elderly, whom, we are to suppose, would be put in immediate and great danger by any change in the law. However, 80% of Britons are in favour of legalising asssisted dying, and around 76% of Canadians. A recent British Social Attitudes Survey (not sure of the year) found that 80% of those who had formerly opposed assistance in dying changed their opinion after experiencing the suffering death of a loved one.

I would say it’s not so much worth less as more harmful. Thinking more with wrong and harmful premises is probably worse than thinking less without the wrong and harmful premises, at least in cases of this kind. They start with the premise that there is a god who decides when we’re born and when we die (and then they carefully don’t think about existing medical interventions) and then they think a lot about how rebellious and impious it is for us to attempt to escape our fate (except when it comes to medical interventions other than euthanasia, but they’ve already decided not to think about that, so the confusion doesn’t get in their way).

In my view their particular framework of ‘my belief is true’ is not worthless but actively harmful.